Time Keeps Moving On

It’s Week 8 now of the semester and it seems to be flying by. I received feedback on my course from peer. I’m happy to share that it was positive and only required a few changes. She suggested that I add spaces for names on my worksheets, which I did. I admit that I overlooked that detail and it’s an important one. She also suggested that I add hours for the library, which I did as well. We don’t normally promote our hours as the Business Library promotes that whenever we are open, no matter the time, someone is always available to help you. That being said for online students it would be helpful for them to know exactly when the Business Library is open so that they could better coordinate with their schedules.

She also suggested I review my discussion posts for grammatical issues. I did review them but nothing jumped out at me, so I have asked her if she saw specific issues and if she would share them with me. Other items she mentioned were to space out the learning goals and objectives so that they are easier to read and to add bullets to the course timeline. I agreed that it was a lot of information condensed so I did my best to space them out within the syllabus and added bullets. I think it’s now easier to read and to follow. Another suggestion was to indent the discussion post examples, which I did and I added color to their headings to help them stand out more.

Some of her suggestions could not be used because the concerns she raised address the native features of the tutorial design, and I am unable to modify them. She mentioned that the help box covered the text but I can’t change its position when it’s clicked on. Luckily, the help box is meant to be hidden so I am hoping it won’t be an issue. She also mentioned that the text box on the left was small but again that is part of the tutorial design.

One suggestion that she made that I chose to leave the same related to my references in the tutorial. My peer reviewer suggested that I make the text for the references smaller. I decided to leave the text alone as changing the size of the reference text wouldn’t be consistent with all the other text in the tutorial. In addition, I am trying to model how references should look for the students and the size of the text for the references should be the same size as the text of the content (McDonald, 2011).

It’s very stressful working on a professional timeline. Not only is it very rapid paced but also it’s extremely rigid. There’s not a lot of room for flexibility. You have to plan out how you want to approach the project and then, you must stick to the timeline. In my case, I was able to stay on top of my schedule and the development of my course went smoothly. I hope with future instructional designs I won’t always be working completely on my own and will have some design help. I am glad that I am getting this experience while I still have my professor’s and peer’s feedback close at hand.